25 February 2010

"Greetings. I found an entry on Mike Snider's blog that said you are askingfor 'odd and invented forms'.

i have invented a lot of poetic forms over the years, as well as entire systems of versification. often i combine multiple modes & rhetorical figures.i have written about some on them on my blogs Xvarenah http://graywyvern.blogspot.com (& its successor Abfraction/Unperson/Cardmember http://graywyvern.livejournal.com).

My investigations into the ghazal are chronicled on my ghazal blog:http://banzufalemusycei.blogspot.com

"ALL the neo-formalisms: actually, there are as many ordering principlesas you want. pick any two contrastive features, & emphasizeone of them in a way that will be perceived as recurrence.this is the figure, the rest is the ground. we are notlimited by the ones commonly collected by authors oftreatises on prosody: i have written poems, for instance,in which all the letters of each line (A=1, B-2...Z=26)added up to 365. or alternated lines in each of threelanguages ABCABC... instead of rhyming, endwords couldbe marked by reverse consonance (as a poet in the Phil-ippines invented); or there could be a cadence of stresses& nonstresses that repeats at irregular intervals withina free verse poem. these are only just a few thoughts thatcame to mind at the moment. but it seems to me that theprinciple here is this: that you have some algorithmwhich cuts across the spontaneous utterance & transformsit, whether by compelling or prohibiting a certain element.in a word: ASKESIS."

"...i have sometimes opted for a "neo-sijo" of 7-8-7-8-8-5 syllables."

Two areas i have investigated extensively: Neoprosody & Rhime (gematria number-rhyme).Neoprosody can be briefly encapsulated as syllabism using lines of an odd-number of syllables & stanzas (usually) that contain a prime-number of syllables (example: 9-5-9-5-9).Rhime pairs words that are equal sums in the English gematria of A=1, B=2...Z=26.

Once i figured out the best way to write quantitative verse in English:http://www.lojban.org/tiki/essay+on+Quantitative+Meter

"Family Alliteration":http://graywyvern.livejournal.com/2010/01/07/

The "Jacobean Noh play" i wrote under the title of The King in Yellow:http://graywyvern.blogspot.com/2006_08_20_graywyvern_archive.html#115628547804935580is written in 7-syllable "rhiming" couplets.It mostly uses each of the number-sums up to (...) only once.

I am also fond of my "heroic limerick", which starts with a heroic couplet instead of two anapestic trimeters.

"It has always bothered me that the division in sonnetsbetween the octave & the sestet, comes about sixsyllables short of dividing this 140 syllable form intothe Golden Section. E.g. 86 + 53 = 139 for a muchmore numerologically satisfying arrangement. Or 137= 85 + 52, which i have sometimes lineated as 13-11-13-11-13-11-13 & 11-9-7-9-7-9. For a long time i only wrotethirteen line sonnets ("treizains"), & the same numbersi mentioned above for 137 syllables total can easily belineated into 11-10-11-10-11-10-11-11 & 10-10-11-10-11."

Michael Helsem

PS you do know about "20-consonant poetry" & "14-vowel poetry" (William the Gillespie)...?

PPS I stole this form from Endre Ady but it's a good one:

'The Mute Griffins

They pass across the sky at noon,the summer noon,through seas ablaze with searing light--the golden barbed and golden scaledlions of flight.

These birds are voiceless, proudly mute,despairing mute,and if they make a sound they swayand fall to earth a shadowy brown,a sparrow gray.

And there they pass the sky at noon,the summer noon,in black of pride through seas of light--the golden barbed and golden scaledlions of flight.'

--Ady

"O Java Tide"

The chilly waters of the nightare not the night.The ratchet of my anti-theftdevice scrapes in a silent car;the lone drive's left.

The frigid margins of the dreamare not the dream.I venture onto foreign soilin search of rapture & to springa hoar gargoyle.

I trail no saving string.

The frozen surface of my lifeis not my life."

"Hello, Michael,

Have you looked at the "Odd and Invented Forms" blog located at www.lewsturco.typepad.com? If not, please take a look at it. Then, if you have some forms that you have examples and descriptions of, and that have been used by other people besides yourself, get back to me."